Friday, May 25, 2012

Pinterest, Spam and a Dash of Porn?


I joined Pinterest about 3 months ago.  I've had a really good time pinning, making sure I check out pictures before I pin them.   I won't pin anything originating from Google or Etsy, for example. (the latter is a site where crafts people market their goods), or if, for any reason, I feel there may be a copyright problem.  I try to be respectful.

Other users of Pinterest can take your "pins" and "repin" them onto their own "boards". They can repin, and/or "like", and/or add a comment.  The ability to add comments is a double edged sword but I rarely have had problems.

The problem is, spammers can add comments to your pin and then your picture is out there (let's say, a picture you posted from your blog - which many bloggers, including me, do) with a spam comment.

Pinterest will email you when someone repins, likes, or comments on one of your pins.  If you do a lot of pinning, you just don't have time to read those emails.  But, I strongly suggest you do.

A spammer got hold of one of my pins and added spam about a weight loss site. 

The email from Pinterest (the usual "so and so has repinned your pin (name of pin) "has a link to report the pinner.  I tried clicking on the link and the link did not work.

I went to Pinterest to see how I could report this.  It doesn't seem to be a very easy process (if someone can explain this to me, I would really appreciate it.) but I got the idea that I had to go to the board where my pin (with the spam) had been repinned, and right click the pin.  I would then get a menu and could choose a function that would report the pin.

When I went to the board- I sure got an eyeful.

Let's put it delicately.  A lot of the pictures (all of which had this weight loss spam attached to it, it appeared) had pictures of women in bikinis.  But not all of them did.  Some of the pictures I would consider soft core porn.  As in, a man and a woman, without clothes from the waist up, with two bars across the woman's, uh, well, this is a family type blog and I will not explain the pictures further.

I can assure you my picture had nothing to do with women in bikinis or the other thing.  And I wasn't going to wade through all those pins to find it. 

OK.  I don't consider myself a prude, but I don't want my pin posted on some board with that type of material (or any type of material!) with spam relating to weight loss.

Moral of story:  The Internet is what it is.  Like in real life, there are decent people, and there are those who will take advantage.

So what can I do about it?  I would surely love to know.

And, have you (if you are a user of Pinterest, that is) had a similar experience?



2 comments:

  1. A: Here's a link to the page on Pinterest that explains how to report spam or other objectionable content:

    https://support.pinterest.com/entries/21051498-how-do-i-report-objectionable-content-or-spam

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you, Michelle. I wasn't feeling well when I found this out. Now, I have more energy to follow up on this - if I can find the email!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for visiting! Your comments mean a lot to me, and I appreciate each one. These comments are moderated, so they may not post for several hours. If you are spam, you will find your comments in my compost heap, where they will finally serve a good purpose.